Writing mysteries is hard.
I've read mysteries since I learned to read. One of my first favorite books is "It's A Mystery, Charlie Brown!" (I even conned a bunch of my friends to do a play of it in the fourth grade.) I watched Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys every Sunday Night. I READ every Nancy Drew book throughout 4th and 5th grades. I read Trixie Belden. Cherry Ames, the nurse who did SOME sleuthing. I never missed Charlie's Angels. Until Kate Jackson left. I still have a copy of a Dynamite magazine that gave tips on how to be a PI. I got pretty good at snooping through my Mom's purse.
I got hooked on Evanovich in grad school. Then read the ENTIRE Alphabet Series A - Y. EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of Bones (which are nothing like the books by the way. I'm up to #7.) I'm burrowing through "The Cat Who" series (in your honor, Christine Cooper.) I just finished another Inspector Gamache audiobook. (Louise Penny rocks, y'all. Too bad the Three Pines series did not pan out. Maybe if they'd stayed a little truer to the characters?)
Jonathan Kellerman. Robert Crais. An occasional Bosch book/episode. Elizabeth Peters and Amelia Peabody. I've even gone old school and read an Agatha Christie or two. Death on the Nile is my favorite. I've seen Murder on the Orient Express three times. The first one. With Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, AND Ingrid Bergman.
CSI. Las Vegas, Miami, AND New York. NCIS. NCIS New Orleans.(Didn't watch LA much). Rockford. Columbo. Quincy. Remington Steele. I went to see The Maltese Falcon in the theater.
You'd think I'd have this down. You'd THINK.
Then I got this idea at the end of 2019, From a WESTERN, of all things, and hours and hours of Supernatural binge-watching. Here it is almost four years later, and I'm writing, and...
My plot isn't even that intricate or complicated. There's a bad guy (basically) and the good guys catch him (eventually). (Sorry for the spoiler but they DO have a formula). And well...dang. Can't be THAT hard, right?
RIGHT???
They always say write what you know. Stephen King always writes about...writers. Kathy Reichs really is a forensic archaeologist. Patricia Cornwell worked for a real M.E. As a kid, I wrote about...kid stuff. Then I wrote about musicians. Wow. That was hard. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Which is only about 5% reality. The other 95%? Spinal Tap. I've been lost under a stage. Not that much of a challenge: Being lost under the stage or writing about it.
And for all of my "if it weren't for you snooping kids" bravado from my "snooping kid" years, sitting down and writing a real "crime" story HAS been a challenge. I'm definitely not a cop or a private investigator, or an investigative journalist, who, as I've noticed from all of this TV watching, is always the one tracking down the real killer or trying to solve the real crime. (Kolchak, anyone? Talk about having cheese with your whine.) I was doing okay, doing mystery stuff...a little character development here, scene setting there...until it was time to do the real "mystery" stuff.
Wait, the guy didn't figure that out? He didn't ask that question first? This person was where when they saw what? Well...that's not very smart policing. That detail won't work there. If they found his body here, why did they say he collapsed there?
Where did I write that part? What page was THAT on?? Who said THAT?
I usually make stuff up on the fly (they call us "pantsers") but I (mostly) have a loose outline I follow. Stories just go where they go at times and that type of spontaneity is fun. But when you're writing a mystery, you have to have a pretty good idea of how to solve it or you'll have plot holes all over the place. So I had to sit down and really start mapping things out. Then I discovered that my plot is a little bit more complicated than I originally thought.
Isn't that special??
'Scuse me while I zip through another Martha Grimes and see if I can't figure this out.
